Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [97]
In San Francisco’s financial district, the entrepreneur behind a rock venue called the Old Waldorf converted the room’s former backstage area into an English pub for the lunch crowd, then asked a local promoter to turn the space into a comedy club at night. That place became the Punch Line. With Cobb’s Comedy Club just up Columbus in Fisherman’s Wharf and a hovel called the Holy City Zoo out in the Richmond district, San Francisco soon renewed its reputation as a comedy mecca. Homegrown talent such as Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, and Bobby Slayton crossed paths nightly with carpetbaggers like Poundstone and Ellen DeGeneres.
The rise of Saturday Night Live was often credited as one reason for the resurgence of interest in comedy. Another was HBO, which was reminding home viewers of the pleasure of seeing a comic craftsman work in long form, as opposed to the six-minute allotments of talk show appearances. “If you were in Birmingham, Alabama, and said ‘stand-up comedy,’ people would think Bob Hope,” said one veteran standup. “It took cable to expose America to comedy as an art form.”
Carlin, of course, was well beyond the nightclub stage by this time. Having established that the rock ’n’ roll crowd would pay to see a comedy star in a concert setting, he had helped clear the path for major concert draws such as Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, and Eddie Murphy. Ironically, the new emphasis on club comics had the effect of pushing Carlin off into his own realm.
He was a hero to many of the new generation of comics, who loved the twisted recesses of his mind and his insistence on concise language. “There are so many comedians that wanted to be a comedian because of him,” says Steven Wright. “What a brain he had.” But Carlin was also considerably older than the new breed, turning forty-four in 1981. He’d been too young for Lenny’s generation and too old for SNL, and now he was too successful to join the fraternity of the clubs. He had become an island—a creature of show business who would just as soon have nothing to do with show business. His record sales had dropped off, his movie had fallen through, and he didn’t know where the HBO affiliation would lead. It would be some time before he realized that his unique voice had only begun to develop.
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AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
Carlin’s resurrection began, funnily enough, just after his second heart attack in the summer of 1982. Scheduled to tape his third HBO special, this time at Carnegie Hall, Carlin suffered a much more serious heart attack than the first, while watching a baseball game at Dodger Stadium. After checking into the hospital, he was flown to Atlanta, where an Emory University Hospital surgeon named Andreas Gruentzig was experimenting with balloon angioplasty, at that time an innovative method of opening obstructed arteries. Carlin was an early recipient of the treatment.
A year before the heart attack, he’d had an accident behind the wheel. Driving from Toronto to Dayton, where Brenda was visiting family, he hit a utility pole in the early morning hours in downtown Dayton, breaking his nose and suffering cuts on his face. Taxes, heart scares, car crashes: Still, he muddled through. In January 1981 Carlin stepped up as the first guest host of a year-old sketch comedy show on ABC called Fridays. An unabashed attempt to elbow in on some of the audience NBC had amassed for its wildly popular Saturday Night Live, Fridays enjoyed a honeymoon season with its ensemble